


the dreaming track

by ssstrychnine



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Australian Aboriginal Mythology, Creation Myth, F/M, Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-01
Updated: 2017-07-01
Packaged: 2018-11-21 19:12:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,748
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11363817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ssstrychnine/pseuds/ssstrychnine
Summary: the vuvalini teach furiosa some of their myths





	the dreaming track

**Author's Note:**

> written for the 2015 mad max secret santa on tumblr. it was posted here as part of a comp fic but i decided i liked it enough to give it it's own thing so. thank you for reading!

Furiosa does not want to rule. She spends weeks under a haze of blood and when she wakes the girls watch her like she has come to save them. They lead her through the Citadel, showing her the things they have accomplished without her; a drawing by Toast of a reservoir, the water falling then settling and still. The trays of seedlings Dag is tending with her crooked fingers made soft. Furiosa doesn’t say anything, but her chest hurts when she looks at them and she doesn’t know if it’s pride or fear or just the sort of ache that comes with the healing of punctured lungs.

There are two of the Vuvalini left. Spoke, who has been sorting through the Organic Mechanic’s skin shop while Furiosa recovers, and Jedda, who is teaching Cheedo how to ride a bike. Furiosa can’t speak to them either, she finds that there is nothing she knows in their faces. No green place, no comfort. She makes her flesh hand a fist and curls it to her chest, her heart, the only thing she remembers of a place that had a thousand songs of history.

“We made our own choices,” Jedda says, seeing through her in an instant. “The others are riding a different road.”

“I remember Val,” says Furiosa quietly. “I remember she had knucklebones.”

“They were her mothers,” says Jedda, nodding. “She used them to tell fortunes.”

“Did it work?”

“Maybe,” Jedda shrugs. “Maybe it was just a comfort kept for the worst nights.”

When Furiosa has been awake for a week, one of the not-war pups calls her Imperator. He says it innocently enough, with his face bare of paint and his fingers in his mouth, but it knocks the wind from her chest. She sits down on the floor, she rests her head on her knees, she moves her hand to unbuckle her prosthetic but she finds only soft cotton at her waist. Her arm was lost with Joe’s face. The boy watches her while she gulps in air like she’s drowning and the rattle of her injured insides make a sound like ghosts or monsters in the shadowed corridor.

“ _Furiosa_ ,” says the boy, and she can breathe again.

She starts taking a bike out as soon as her injuries let her. She goes to the canyon and skirts the edges, never venturing inside. It would not be wise to make the bikers angry again, not on her own. Most of the wreckage of the war parties has been salvaged, there are the angry gouges in the earth from tires and scrap being dragged away. She hopes that whoever has taken it will use it well, use it for something other than power and death.

At the Citadel she finds a place close to the ground to make her own. It is far enough away that it takes time for people to find her, far enough away that they might decide not to. She isn’t hiding, she just needs the quiet, the still comfort of rock walls and a packed earth floor. She builds herself a new arm and it’s not so much a part of her as the old one yet, but it works. Capable comes to her most often, Capable who is better at ruling than Furiosa, though she doesn’t know it yet. Capable who looks after everyone. Sometimes she brings one of the others, Cheedo who is turning into a speed demon, Toast who has all the makings of a black thumb. Dag visits least of all; she has her green children and the one stretching out her belly. Other lives to think about. Furiosa loves them all, but they still think that it will be her that fills the gap that Joe left behind.

In the evenings Furiosa goes to Jedda and Spoke and learns her history. There are Vuvalini still, they say, walking on stilts through the black swamp, mould growing on their insides. The crows carried spores on their feathers and in their beaks, and creeping vines grew and sucked the water from the earth and gave back only poison.

“No air, no rain,” says Spoke, shaking her head. “It’d go up to the clouds and come down still poison.”

“Not an enemy you can fight,” says Jedda. “Can’t rip the jaw off the rain.”

They teach her their dreaming track, the Vuvalini’s history song, lists of names and nature and nightmares. The green place, yes, but the hollow tree too, and the Bora rings. Furiosa had been taken before she had completed her Bora and she does not have the scars on her fingers or the burns on the soles of her feet that might have made it easier to feel like she was one of them.

“You gave your hand,” says Jedda, shrugging. “It’s gone to Yhi, you’ve done enough. The rings are sunk in swamp now anyway.”

They tell her who Yhi is, a woman who walked, who grew green in her footsteps. A woman or a dream or some part of both from a thousand thousand years ago, long before the world died. A woman who was warm and made light with her eyes and who the Vuvalini called theirs. Furiosa listens to the stories and the songs and she can’t make herself feel anything for this woman, though she breaks her knuckles trying.

Max does not come back. Absurdly she thinks that he might be able to make sense of her, untwist her insides or straighten out her thoughts, but he does not come back and she doesn’t lose sleep over it.

For three hundred days she ignores the ways the Citadel pulls at her. The girls set up a committee eventually, with members of every group. There is a milking mother named Sweet and a war boy named Jakob and a wretched woman named Luss. Furiosa is invited to their meetings and she makes sure she’s away, out on the sand, every time.

Toast’s reservoir is built, using scrap from the dismantled lifts. They build a wall too, and a spiked trench in front, and a patchwork gun turret, but they let in anyone who looks like they’ve lost their fight with the desert. Dag’s green grows but the child in her belly comes out dead. She buries its remains under a spring-green fruit tree and refuses to talk to anyone about it except for Cheedo. Capable holds the heart of the Citadel and she bears that burden as best as she is able. She cites Angharad’s name whenever she can and she shows the Citadel’s children her words, still painted in what was once the vault.

“I’m going to leave,” Furiosa tells Dag one day, in her herb room. She does not know why she chooses Dag to tell, but the girl seems unsurprised, clapping the dirt off her hands and squinting up at Furiosa with her sky eyes narrowed.

“Toast will hate you,” she says after a pause. “She still wants to be your left hand.”

Furiosa touches the place where her prosthetic has rubbed her stump raw. It still does not sit right with her. The leather is still too stiff and the metal is still too cold and none of it is her yet.

“She would be better at it than this,” she says, smiling. “But she is needed here.”

“Yes,” Dag agrees, getting to her feet. “And you’ll come back.”

She does tell the others before she leaves and Toast disappears and Cheedo cries and Capable kisses her cheek. She tells the Vuvalini too and they exchange a knowing glance and give her a string of beads made from bone.

“Made from the knucklebones,” says Jedda. “When the future got to easy to tell.”

She takes a bike loaded up with water and guzz and green and she doesn’t look back. The hole in the Citadel has been filled with a myriad of people and it’s the hardest thing in the world but Furiosa has faith in all of them.

There is something clean about the wind that tugs at her skin and her clothing, something new and old all at once. She thinks about the way the sand fans out from the back wheel of the bike. She thinks about Valkyrie’s hands on her shoulders and Max’s blood in her veins. Somehow she knows with absolute certainty that she will find him. He walks like Yhi, a man and a dream combined, tripping over the line between alive and dead, and she will find him before the last drop of guzz tugs at her engine.

She is running low when she comes across him in orange sunset. He is sitting on the hood of his car and his hair is longer but his eyes are just the same.

“You’re far from home,” he says when he sees her. She doesn’t reply, she just climbs up next to him and they watch the sun bleed into the desert. Furiosa feels something settle inside her, something cool and still and infinite. She lifts her hand to shade her eyes and she smiles into the sun and she can feel that Max is watching her so she smiles wider.

There is a giant snake in the desert. A rainbow serpent who holds the world’s water between its teeth. Furiosa knows this because she had offered up her life on the fury road and the serpent had not taken it.

“I was supposed to die,” she tells Max, later, when the moon is high and they are sitting by a fire. “I was supposed to die with Joe.”

“Mm,” murmurs Max. “I figure we’re all on borrowed time.”

Furiosa rolls her shoulders back until something inside her cracks. She pushes the toe of her boot into the charred, cherry red embers of the fire. Max is next to her, hunched in on himself like a car crash. She shuffles closer to him; she tucks herself in under his arm and curls her fingers into the soft warmth of his shirt, his skin. He doesn’t say anything but perhaps he makes a noise, like a sigh, like an ache. They fit themselves together in some way that is both too close and not close enough. Furiosa thinks that she has never felt so unattached, so irresponsible, so _free_ , and she tells Max this and he shrugs, and the corners of his mouth deepen, and he kisses her flesh hand, and they watch the fire die.

**Author's Note:**

> [say hello if you like!](http://oneangryshot.tumblr.com)


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